On Tuesday Jessi and I decided to clean out our garage. Mostly because we had a bunch of old stuff that had started to accumulate, but also because I have a crazy dream of one day actually owning less stuff than when we moved in (this goes with my idea of spending on experiences). We started at 4pm and finished at midnight.
Our process was to take everything out of the garage and put it into 1 of 5 piles: Keep, give away, sell, trash & unknown. We then consolidated and re-organized the items we wanted to keep, and will do the appropriate thing with the other items.
The picture above is the before shot. The picture below is the after shot. All of that stuff in the font center of the garage is going away. We also filled the back of my truck with larger items, and created a nice pile of wood for an up-coming camping trip. It's hard to tell from the photos, but we easily eliminated 1/3 of the items.
Often times the hardest items to decide on while cleaning are the sentimental ones - you know you're never going to use it again, but when you see it, you can't help but smile at the thought of the memory. We'll, we came up with a solution that helped a lot: Take a picture. Here are two examples:
One is of a box that Jessi used to transport one of her sculptures she made in college. The other is some shredded money from the Fed in San Francisco I got while visiting with my family. Both are no longer in our garage, but now the memories live on our computers (and screen savers). Now we will actually see, and remember, those items/events more often.Finally, while cleaning we put all our tools/materials on one of our tables so we could re-organize our shelve. We took a picture of it because it made a really cool "eye-spy" type of photo. Can you find the 5 glass mason jars? How about the red pipe wrench?
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